MONTEPULCIANO, Italy — There is a particular kind of quiet that settles over a wine cellar carved into the tufa beneath a Renaissance palazzo, and it is a quiet that has very little to do with silence. It has to do with time. At Talosa, the historic aging cellar sits beneath two sixteenth-century buildings, Palazzo Tarugi and Palazzo Sinatti, a few steps from the Piazza Grande, and the galleries date back to the 1500s, built entirely of brick, with arches and niches that hold the barrels in a kind of hushed, vaulted geometry. One does not so much visit this cellar as descend into it, the way one descends into an argument about terroir that has been going on, more or less without interruption, since the Etruscans.

The estate itself is a comparatively recent chapter in that argument. Talosa has been owned since 1972 by the Roman entrepreneur Angelo Jacorossi, and it was one of the first wineries in Montepulciano to pursue a serious path toward quality, at a moment when Vino Nobile di Montepulciano was still working to shed its reputation as Tuscany’s more rustic, less celebrated cousin to Chianti and Brunello. The estate today farms 33 hectares, producing roughly 100,000 bottles a year, with Sangiovese — locally called Prugnolo Gentile — standing as the heart, heritage, and, one is tempted to say, soul of the operation. Three generations of the Jacorossi family have now had a hand in it, which in Tuscany qualifies you as reasonably new money, but competent new money, and the wines bear that out.

I tasted three of them recently, over the course of an evening that involved a good deal of bread, olive oil, and the sort of unhurried conversation that Sangiovese seems to invite. Here is what I found.

2022 Talosa Alboreto Sangiovese, Vino Nobile di Montepulciano

This is the entry point into the Talosa style, and a graceful one. The 2022 is young, obviously. It has the bright, almost impatient fruit of a wine that has not yet been asked to sit still for very long, but there is real structure underneath the cherry and dried-herb nose, a sandy, mineral undertow that reminds you this is Sangiovese grown at altitude, in the stony ground of the Pietrose district, rather than something knocked together to move quickly through a supermarket. The tannins are present but well-mannered; the acidity does the talking. It finishes clean, a touch savory, with none of the jammy fatigue that afflicts too much modern Sangiovese aimed at the American palate.

Food pairing: This is a trattoria wine, and it wants trattoria food. Pair it with pici cacio e pepe, or a simple grilled pork sausage with white beans. It would also do very well alongside a plate of prosciutto and a wedge of pecorino toscano; nothing fussy, nothing that requires the wine to work too hard.

2020 Talosa Riserva Sangiovese, Vino Nobile di Montepulciano

The Riserva is where Talosa stops being modest. This is, by the estate’s own reckoning, the fullest expression of its Sangiovese. The grapes most rigorously selected, the wine given real time in large oak before release. What you get in the glass is something darker and more serious than the Alboreto: black cherry rather than red, leather and tobacco leaf entering the picture, a firmer grip of tannin that suggests this wine has decades, not years, ahead of it if you have the patience. The 2020 vintage gave Montepulciano warm, generous conditions, and the Riserva shows it — there is real concentration here, but the wine never loses the essential Tuscan trait of savory restraint. It is a wine that argues rather than shouts.

Food pairing: Bistecca alla fiorentina is the obvious answer, and obvious for good reason. The char and the fat need a wine with this much backbone. Failing a proper Florentine steak, a braised short rib or a wild boar ragu over pappardelle will do the wine every bit as much justice.

2021 Talosa Filai Lunghi, Vino Nobile di Montepulciano

The Filai Lunghi is the single-vineyard bottling, and it tastes like a wine with a specific address rather than a general one. “Filai lunghi” means, roughly, the long rows, a reference to the particular parcel the fruit comes from, and there is a precision to this wine that separates it from its two stablemates. The nose is more floral, violets alongside the cherry, with a graphite minerality that keeps reasserting itself through the glass. On the palate it is the most elegant of the three, less about power than about tension: bright acid, fine-grained tannin, a long, slightly bitter-almond finish that Sangiovese devotees will recognize as one of the grape’s great, understated pleasures. Give it air. It rewards patience in the decanter as much as in the cellar.

Food pairing: This is a wine for roasted meats with a bit of nuance rather than brute force; roast duck with cherry or fig, or a porchetta seasoned heavily with rosemary and fennel works nicely. It would also make a fine, if slightly contrarian, partner to a rich mushroom risotto, the earthiness of the porcini playing nicely against that graphite edge.

Taken together, these three bottles read almost like a short course in what Vino Nobile di Montepulciano is capable of when a producer takes it seriously; an ascending line from easy generosity to real gravity, without ever losing the thread of place. Talosa’s underground galleries, dug first by the Etruscans and later fortified as bunkers during the war, have seen a great deal of history pass overhead. It is a comfort, of a kind, to report that the wine resting down there is worth the trip.